Chapter One

Time Comes to Art from the Future

Hagi Kenaan

In turning to reflect on the future of art, we typically tend to frame the question of art’s future as a question about the possibilities that lie in wait for art. The question of the future of art is, in other words, typically taken to be one about art in the future. What forms and configurations, what kinds of tasks and roles, what impact will art have in ten or fifty or a hundred years? Putting the question in this way already presupposes, however, a given, albeit implicit, understanding of what is meant by the term future. The future, according to this understanding, is what lies beyond the time-frame we call “the present.” As such, it is (rightly) taken to offer a field of new forms of life grounded in new technologies and new sociopolitical constellations that, in a corollary manner, make room for new forms of artwork and artistic practice. Art’s future is thus articulated in terms of a picture depicting a new stage in art’s life or, better, a transfigured stage in our human life-with-art. Yet, whereas the coordinates of such a picture belong indeed to a moment in the future, the picture itself seems to lack any futurity and unfolds, rather, within the confines of an indefinite, perhaps an ideal, form of a present. That is to say, what’s envisioned in such typical pictures of the future is fully present contents whose presence differs from our own present simply in that it has not yet materialized. Putting this in another way, we may say that our ways of picturing art’s future are all too often guided by an atemporal framing of the future, one based, to use Bergson, on the reduction of the temporal to the spatial.

But there is also another way of understanding the term “art’s future”: the future of art is one of art’s temporal aspects, a dimension of artworks that is an essential part of their temporal constitution. This sense of the artwork’s future can resonate only if we recognize and embrace temporality as essential to the artwork’s being, only when we view the artwork as an essentially temporal kind of being. This would mean, however, that artworks are not only made and exhibited in given points in time or that they accumulate a history, but that their presence is always more complicated than any form of givenness determined by a given present. Artworks speak to us, turn to us, in a manner that is made possible only within more complex structures in which past, present, and future are intertwined and cannot be understood independently of each other. An artwork’s presence can become meaningful (in the present) only within a horizon of futurity, within an openness toward that which, while lurking beyond the now, is constantly under way to becoming the artwork’s present and, then, its past.

However, being pregnant with a future is not just a factual aspect of the artwork’s being. Clearly, in being temporal, artworks are entities that have a future and, as such, bear the potential of taking part in a series of successive nows. But in the sense that concerns us, the term “art’s future” denotes more than that: art’s future is a constitutive dimension of the artwork’s being, implying a specific kind of involvement of the future in the artwork’s present. But, how, exactly, is the future present in the artwork?

Confining the discussion to the visual arts, let’s attempt a preliminary answer by turning to an ancient figure, one that in interesting ways epitomizes a fundamental insight regarding the temporal essence of pictures in the Western tradition. I am thinking here of a mythical image that appears again and again in the history of reflection on the origin of art from Quintilian to Alberti to Leonardo and Vasari to Rousseau and Romanticism and, in twentieth-century French philosophy, from Merleau-Ponty to Derrida. This image—tale or myth—of the origins of image-making (drawing or painting) is first found in Pliny’s Natural History, which, in fact, provides two versions of the myth. While both versions describe the first act of drawing as a tracing of a man’s shadow on a wall, the second more elaborate account locates the arché of the image with the horizons of a story of love and abandonment. This second account is given by Pliny precisely at the moment he moves away from painting to a discussion of a different art form, the modeling of clay.

Enough and more than enough has been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modeling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter from Sycion, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when this young man was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the shrine of the nymphs.1

Pliny’s account provides a concrete setting for the legendary birth of the image, one that integrates the allegedly technical act of the tracing of a shadow into the particularity of a painful and dramatic moment. Butades—who in the tradition takes on the name of her father—becomes the tradition’s first painter in virtue of a gesture directed toward her lover’s imminent departure. This gesture is twofold: It does not grow out of a single, self-identical origin, but develops, rather, from an intertwining of love and loss, eros and thanatos. The first painter is thus a woman who experiences the world without collapsing the experiences of desire and loss into one another, without replacing one for another. The young woman is in love, but she also knows she has been abandoned. Her turning to art is thus a way of responding to that irresolvable tension, to a predicament that is, in fact, central to the human condition as such. That is, Butades finds herself caught between two equally fundamental modes of experiencing the world: On the one hand, the world draws us in and offers itself to us through the possibility, the promise, the allure of the future,that is, through the meaningful things and people that matter to us, that we can love and attach ourselves to; on the other hand, it is a place in which we experience the inevitable passing of time as we also find ourselves separated, cut off from, forsaken by the things and people we care about and love. Furthermore, this twofold experience of eros and thanatos also has a temporal side to it: While desire is future oriented—fueled by the promise of the “not yet”—loss carries the weight of the “has been,” the past. Hence, the first drawing act emerges out of the intersection of two courses of temporal movement: Being in her lover’s presence—with its promise of even the minutest possibility of love—the first painter crowns the future as a source for the arrival of time—of a time—in the present. Yet, facing the departure of her lover, her present is infused with a time that has become a past, a no longer. The intertwining of these two intentionalities is not a coincidence but reflects, in my view, the complexity of the temporal structure that is at work in the making of this prototypical image. (See figure 1.1.)

Interpreters of Pliny’s tale typically underscore the importance of the connection between image, shadow, and death, which seems to call for an anthropologically oriented investigation. Victor Stoichiţă, for example, suggests that we cannot understand the making of the image by the daughter and her father the potter “without visualizing the ritual actions we exert over it” and specifically, “a cult of the ‘clay semblance’ that reproduces, includes and accommodates the ‘shadow’ of the young man who in all probability is forever absent.”2 Death and absence—and with them the idea of the insubstantial eidolon, the surrogate image—may indeed play an important part in Pliny’s tale, but they should not hide from us the specificity of the temporal structure—the intertwining—constitutive of the first act of drawing described in this tale of origin(s).

Butades traces the shadow of her departing lover. Like the shadow, the presence of her love is tenuous; and yet, she is not tracing a mere absence. The first painter draws a line by which she touches—or, which literally puts her in touch, rather, with—that transient presence, the transience of the present, the resonance of futurity. In other words, Butades’s primordial act of drawing is not simply an attempt to replace absence with a new form of presence as much as it reflects an attempt to create a new place for herself vis-à-vis a difficult transition: What the first painter faces is the overbearing presence of an open future whose other side is the gradual disappearance, the absencing, of the present that grounds her world. Her prototypical act of drawing is thus a tracing, beyond a shadow, of a twofold temporal contour consisting of what has not yet happened but is yet to come and of what has happened and will no longer be.

The first drawn line not only responds to the manner in which the future lurks on the horizon of the present against the background of the past, but it also consists of a specific projection of itself onto that future. Butades’s drawing not only addresses the imminent departure of her lover but becomes fully significant only through its ability, in the future, to bear witness to the lover’s presence after his departure. The bearing of this futural dimension is a paradigmatic aspect of the tradition of portraiture in which the very idea of creating a “faithful likeness” of a person is inseparable from the intent to remember the depicted person after his or her eventual death. A portrait, in other words, presents itself to posterity, and more specifically, it does so by offering a grid, an infrastructure, for a memory that could only be remembered in the future to come. We may thus say that the portrait’s intertwining of present and future takes the form of a projection by which the artwork’s present appears as its future’s past. But is this temporal structure characteristic only of portraiture? Isn’t it just as present in the form of appearance of that graffiti across the street that I now see through the café’s window?

Treating the artwork’s future as an integral part of the work’s complex temporal structure is a methodology I borrow from Martin Heidegger’s analysis of human temporality. For Heidegger, temporality is the inner form of human existence (which he terms Dasein, i.e., being-there), and its adequate articulation is thus a necessary condition for uncovering the possibility of a true or authentic self. Reading Heidegger in a somewhat instrumental manner, however, I shall limit the discussion to only one aspect of his thinking that would allow for an analogy to be drawn between his understanding of the futurity of human existence and the workings of the future in the artwork.

The future, according to Heidegger, has a double signification. As an aspect of human temporality, its meaningfulness depends on how we make sense of our experience of time: the future commonly appears as part of an average—or in Heidegger’s terms, a “vulgar”—picture of time, but it can also resonate differently when integrated into a more fundamental, existential understanding of temporality. For Heidegger, the average concept of the future grows out of a limited conception of temporality epitomized by “clock time”: that is, “the common understanding of time [that] reveals itself explicitly and primarily in the use of the clock.” When internalizing the clock model as we all too often do, time reveals itself to us as a countable (and accountable) “succession of nows,” a homogeneous, albeit indefinitely long, sequence of equally structured moments (“nows”) that we tend to divide into the segments that make our past, present, and future. While the past appears as a segment of moments that have already happened, the future is commonly understood as the “not-yet-now.”3 It is located further ahead on the time axis, appearing as a segment of the sequence that consists of all those moments that are, in principle, there but still not filled with actual content. Yet, when mapped onto such a homogeneous sequence of successive nows, the future loses its futurity because its meaning is regulated by a now-unit that is structurally identical to any other now on the sequence. In this common picture of time, the directionality of time, its ceaseless movement toward a future, is completely suppressed. In such a picture, there is no trace, for example, of the manner in which the future’s arrival opens up the present—and reopens the past—beyond themselves to the new and unknown, nor of the manner in which, in arriving, the future devours the present, constantly changing it into a past. In other words, what the average understanding of time erases is the actual happening of time, time’s élan or as Heidegger calls it “the temporalization of time.”

Contesting this predominant conception, Heidegger moves toward unpacking an alternative sense of futurity that, for him, holds the key to one of the most fundamental structures of human existence. According to him, the term “existence” should be interpreted in the light of “the Greek expression ekstatikon [, which] means stepping-outside-self.”4 Existence is thus not a static but an ec-static structure: Being outside oneself, ahead of—and thus constantly behind—oneself is the condition of the possibility of becoming who we are and, ultimately, of understanding ourselves also within the reifying coordinates of an average temporal frame of reference. In Heidegger’ words:

We comport ourselves in our Dasein always in some particular way toward our own most peculiar ability to be. . . . In thus comporting toward its own most peculiar capacity to be, it [Dasein] is ahead of itself. Expecting a possibility, I come from this possibility toward that which I myself am. The Dasein expecting its ability to be, comes toward itself. In this coming-toward-itself, expectant of a possibility, the Dasein is futural in an original sense. This coming-toward-itself from one’s most peculiar possibility . . . is the primary concept of the future. This existential concept of the future is the presupposition for the common concept of the future in the sense of the not-yet-now.5

For Heidegger, the original sense of the future grows out of the temporalizing character of the human. Dasein, being-there—in the world—is thus not a something that can be conceptualized independently of temporality. This means that it would be wrong to picture ourselves as self-sufficient entities whose existence takes place in time. In such a picture, the originality of the relation between our existence and temporality is ineluctably lost because the picture supposedly allows us, even tempts us, to conceptualize human existence and time prior to their intertwining (separately and in and of themselves, as it were). Taking an alternative route, Heidegger thus emphasizes the need to circumvent the common idea that human existence occurs in time and acknowledge instead that existence is itself the very happening/occurrence of time. Dasein, being-there, is time; or, in other words, “it is itself the original outside-itself, the ekstatikon.” That is to say, human existence unfolds as a dynamic, unstable structure that is neither self-contained nor self-identical but that is, nevertheless, one of self-determination, becoming what it is in ceaselessly moving—in different ways—toward and away from what it can be and what it has been (e.g., escaping and gaining hold of oneself, inventing oneself anew, or committing oneself to the claims of the past). Existence is thus “the original unity of being-outside-self that comes-toward-self, comes-back-to-self, and makes present.”6

For Heidegger, it is important to recognize how the different ecstasies of time—the past, present, and future—insinuate themselves into each other, ceaselessly pervade each other, in creating a dynamic intertwining that grounds that tenuous unity of human experience. But what matters most for our discussion is his understanding of futurity, which, as suggested, I wish to utilize in thinking of the artwork’s being. The future, according to Heidegger, is not just a distant point of reference on the possible trajectory of human life (or human collective history) but is, first of all, the horizon from which the temporalization of time meets us. To put this simply, time comes to us from the future. That is, time primarily generates itself in our lives through the arrival of—a backward emanation from—a future that takes the form of that sliding back of the present into the past. The future is time’s “accelerator,” and its presence, as such, is constant. The future is (part of the) present, showing itself as the ongoing inflection of all now-points toward a gravitational force that is always beyond them. The future is present, but it does not have the positive presence of the present. Instead, it appears in the form of futurity, a reverberation of what is pending beyond any positivity, a coming into being, an arrival that lacks coordinates since it has still not inscribed itself in time.

An interesting example of how a painting can highlight the workings of this internal temporal structure is Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini portrait. (See figure 1.2.) The literature on this enigmatic portrait is immense, and I am thinking here, specifically, of the inscription we see on the wall, behind the Arnolfinis and above the mirror in which the artist’s figure is reflected. The inscription “Jan van Eyck was here 1434” (“Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434”) serves as the artist’s signature and, together with the mirror image, clearly makes a point about the manner in which the painter inhabits—is present in—his work. Furthermore, what makes the inscription pertinent to our discussion is that van Eyck chose to commemorate his presence in the depicted scene by using a statement in a past tense. Van Eyck’s inscription belongs to an age-old tradition of artworks, going back to ancient Greek vases, that enunciate, in past form, the presence of their maker. Yet, the presence of an artistic convention of this kind only enhances the question: Why does the painter inscribe himself into the picture in past form? Or better, what are the grounds allowing van Eyck to relate to his presence in the (“now” of the) mirror as something occurring in past tense? However, enhanced by this tradition, the key to an answer is found in the understanding that van Eyck’s declaration can only make sense from, what is for him, a futural perspective on the present, that is, an experience of the present that is already couched in—seen through the prism of—the future. The future, in other words, is an enabling condition internal to the picture’s meaningfulness. And it is only because futurity grounds the picture’s presence that a statement in the past can be part of the “now” of van Eyck’s self-presentation. Moreover, we may say that it is precisely by using the past tense in articulating his (visual) presence in the depicted scene that van Eyck is accentuating the manner in which the future is operative within his picture.

Van Eyck’s inscription hints at the inconspicuous presence of the future within the artwork; it functions as a trace of what, in itself, escapes re-presentation, of what cannot be framed thematically, because unlike the contents of the pictorial field, it cannot be contained within the presence of the picture’s present. Futurity may indeed have a resonance in a picture, but it never appears in any determinate form of a this-or-that. It is not a “something” to which we can point in a painting, but rather, the understated temporal movement that, to begin with, enables the painting to present itself as such (i.e., as a painting in the present). But what kind of lesson can be gleaned by recognizing the future’s trace in the artwork?

The future’s imprint in the artwork may be taken as a reminder. It, first of all, reminds us of a dimension of the artwork that remains outside the positivity of the artwork’s presence, uncontainable within the parameters of the present. In Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, for example, I am captured by the double portrait of Michael and Sandy Marsh, Amarillo, Texas, September 27, 1974. (See figure 1.3.) The young couple is lying on a sofa, hugging. Sandy is on top of Michael. Buried in his neck, her face can hardly be seen. Michael, on the other hand, is staring straight into the camera, or better, had stared into the camera on that September day when he was barely thirty years old. Now, his eyes address the photograph’s viewer. His gaze is calm, but it bears a disquieting affect, partly because there is something in that look that refuses to lodge itself within the viewer’s scope of vision. Meeting my returned look, I feel that Marsh’s gaze pierces right through my looking; but, this is not the kind of piercing of which Roland Barthes speaks in describing a photograph’s punctum, at least not the punctum described in the first part of Camera Lucida. Almost forty years have passed since Marsh looked into Shore’s camera, a life’s time. Googling the Marshes, I read a magazine article describing the turmoils of their shared life. Michael Marsh is now far from being thirty years old, and Sandy Marsh is no longer alive. However, it is not the lurking presence of death that inscribes an enigma into the picture. Michael Marsh’s gaze is disquieting because it looks not only through and beyond the camera that was once there but also beyond any subsequent viewer: Shore’s photograph presents a gaze that had looked—and continues looking—into the openness of a future.

The future is present in Shore’s photograph, but its presence is neither a frameable content within the picture nor something containable within the parameters of an onlooker’s gaze. The artwork’s future cannot be grasped by the eye, but this is not because the future hides itself outside the moment in which the artwork is beheld. The future cannot be contained—as a content—within the picture’s frame, but its working in the picture is, nevertheless, actual. It cannot be reduced to an Étant donnés, never takes the form of a given, precisely because it is, itself, a giving. What the future gives the work of art is not the promise of any this or that but, on the contrary, an undoing of the present’s positivity, a stirring up of a peculiar openness that all too often remains hidden by the manner in which what is given captivates the eye. The present (i.e., the gift) of the future is an open present. What this means, however, is that when futurity is present, the artwork is never simply what it is; to recognize the resonance of futurity in an artwork is thus something that goes hand in hand with an understanding of its openness beyond itself, of the artwork’s resistance to closure.

Hence, as long as art harbors a future, the very presence of artworks—the present that they create—will continue to defy the standardization of vision and sense. If an artwork has a future, then the work’s uncontainability will necessarily become part of the space in which it is encountered: an artwork with a future is one that is never fully given to us and that, in the strong sense of the word, can never really belong to us.

Will

Twenty-First-

Century

Art

Remain

Open/Committed

To

The

Future

Of

The

Future?

Notes

1. Plinius Secundus Maior, Caius, Natural History IX, XXXV, trans. H. Rackman (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1952), 43.

2. Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 33.

3. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 256–57.

4. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 267.

5. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 265.

6. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 265.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Plinius Secundus Maior, Caius. Natural History IX, Libri XXXIII–XXXV. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1952.

Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.